Tips to drive traffic to your website

While there may be various means to drive traffic to your website, the most important rule to follow as soon as you build your new website is to submit your websites to search engines. Although search engines will automatically crawl your website, the process may take a while before your website’s content shows up on search sites. It’s, therefore, important to manually submit your URL to all major search engines.

That’s not all. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a popular term in the world of searches. It acts as the primary catalyst that helps in driving traffic to a website. As search engine ranking is critical to every website that resides on the world wide web (WWW), you can find Search Engine Optimizers, who offer professional optimization services, in almost every nook and corner of the globe. No wonder, this has become a very successful business today. Online advertising is also an effective and targeted way of marketing the products/website to potential customers. This should be considered if your business especially falls within the Small and Medium Business (SMB) category as this is one of the most effective means of advertising that exists as of today.

After attending to issues that revolve around search engines and searches, we now have to focus on the base – the website itself. Be sure to use a simple web Analytics tool if not a comprehensive one. This will help analyze user behavior on the website and avoid bottlenecks. Bounce and exit metrics need to be closely monitored to identify the part of the website that drives users away from reaching the target (the website’s purpose, such as completing a purchase, reading an article etc). Ensure that the website design is clean and the navigation anything but complex. Identify and fix broken links that prevent users from navigating further into the website. Use clear, unique titles for each page and provide ample keywords that describe the page’s content within the Meta tag on the page. Avoid using pop-ups and interstitials as much as possible. Next, if it’s an e-commerce website that you’ve built, it’s important for you to offer multiple payment options including at least one online payment option. Remember that these are very important in order to provide a satisfactory experience to your prospective customer.

Finally, let your customers connect among themselves and with other prospective customers. Use links, such as ‘Send this page to your friend,’ and ‘Recommend this site’ that allow your users to pass on the information instantaneously to their family and friends. Also consider adding buttons to share with other users via Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook etc. Display testimonials on the home page and update/rotate them from time to time if applicable for your website. Host a blog or a forum on your website and let your users connect with the host team and remember to post new articles regularly. This will make your website look Live and Active. These are ways of indirectly marketing your website and products while simultaneously building good, trustworthy relationships with customers.